Rappaport, Danielle I

Bio

Danielle Rappaport is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland. Danielle is part of the GEDI team, a satellite mission providing global insights into the three-dimensional structure of Earth's terrestrial ecosystems. 

Danielle brings interdisciplinary expertise in forest ecology, remote sensing, and nature markets. Her research centers on practical science for optimizing ecosystem regeneration and assessing the opportunities, risks, and trade-offs between competing land use priorities. Her work, primarily focused on the tropics, focuses on innovative techniques for leveraging optical, lidar, and acoustic data to measure biodiversity recovery and ecosystem condition at policy-relevant scales. 

Prior to Danielle’s current academic position, she worked with private, public, and non-profit sectors on data-driven initiatives for incentivizing ecosystem regeneration. As Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of the Amazon Investor Coalition, a nature finance mobilization platform funded by the UK Government, Danielle spearheaded programs to drive investment in Amazon forest regeneration. She later served as Lead Scientist and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Nature Tech Collective, the world’s largest membership organization of nature data providers supporting high-integrity nature markets. 

Danielle holds a Masters of Forestry from Yale University and a PhD in Geographical Sciences from the University of Maryland, where she received awards from NSF and NASA for her scholarship.